Paul Yanko (1968 - )

"Channel Module Angle" (mixed) 2010

Since 2004, Youngstown, Ohio native Paul Yanko has been teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. He received an M.F.A. in painting from Kent State University in 1995 and a B.F.A in illustration from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1991. While residing in Ohio, Yanko exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art and the McDonough Museum of Art. In 2002 he was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

His work is included in private and public collections including the Cleveland Clinic, The Greenville County Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Carolina Collection at MUSC in Charleston, SC.

A statement from the artist...

"The densely layered compositions characteristic of my painting are reflective of a desire to reconcile formal painterly concerns with an interest in creating process-derived imagery. I remain equally influenced by emblems of Modernist geometric abstraction in addition to the characteristically intense, saturated hues found in commercial sign painting and toy construction sets.

I develop my paintings systematically through an additive process of layering acrylic paint mixed with acrylic mediums onto masked areas. I initially establish sets of vertical and horizontal bands, applied to either a square or rectangular format, with function as an armature on which subsequent color shapes are layered. As I paint, I allow shapes to shift in registration in order to reveal varying amounts of underlying color."